Recent & Forthcoming 5

The only book to tell the story of the contemporary Black cowboy experience––and the only one to feature photographs––The Long Ride Home presents over 100 color and black-and-white images that convey the beauty, romance, and visual poetry of this way of life and its rich heritage. Although Black cowboys have long been a fixture on the American landscape, few people are aware of their enduring contributions to western history and the settlement of the frontier and of their unique culture that continues to thrive today in urban as well as rural areas all over the country.

The Long Ride Home contains beautiful, compelling, and often surprising contemporary images of African-American cowboy culture that affirm a thriving culture of Black-owned ranches and rodeo operations, parades, inner-city cowboys and retired cowhands––and Black cowgirls of all ages, too. Viewed together they question our long-held notions of what it means to be a cowboy, and with that, what it means to be an American.

The Long Ride Home couldn’t be more timely, coming as it does on the heels of Beyoncé’s hit album, Cowboy Carter (2024) and Idris Elba’s Concrete Cowboy (2021). Elba’s film was based on Greg Neri’s 2013 book, Ghetto Cowboy, about contemporary African-American cowboy culture of Philadelphia and was shot in some of the same neighborhoods where Tarver also made images.

In addition to Tarver’s beautiful and compelling photographs, The Long Ride Home includes an essay by Art. T. Burton, an expert on the history of Black cowboys. This book is both a tribute to and celebration of the Black cowboy in America and provides an invaluable and unique perspective on American culture and history as well as the Black experience in America.

About the Author
Ron Tarver comes from a family of African American cowboys. He grew up in Fort Gibson, a small agricultural community in rural northeastern Oklahoma. His grandfather, a member of the Black Freedman of the Cherokee Tribe, was a working cowboy during the 1940s, and Tarver spent many long, hot summer days hauling hay and working on local farms and ranches, occasionally rounding up stray cows. Tarver has distinguished himself in the field of fine-art photography. In 2021, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in Creative Arts Photography and he has been in more than thirty solo and eighty group exhibitions. His photographs are also in numerous collections, including the National Museum of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Oklahoma History Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Studio Museum in Harlem. As a long-time staff photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he shared the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his work on a series documenting school violence in the Philadelphia public school system, was nominated for three additional Pulitzers, and was honored with awards from World Press Photos and the Sigma Delta Chi Award of the Society of Professional Journalists. Tarver is currently Associate Professor of Art at Swarthmore College. He is co-author, with journalist Yvonne Latty, of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veteran from World War II to the War in Iraq (Harper Collins, 2004), which was accompanied by a traveling exhibition that debuted at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

About the Contributor
Art T. Burton retired in 2015 after spending thirty-eight years in higher education as a professor of history at Prairie State College and South Suburban College and as an administrator in African-American Student Affairs at Benedictine University, Loyola University Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of several groundbreaking books on African-American history in the West, most recently Cherokee Bill: Black Cowboy-Indian Outlaw (Eakins Press, 2020) and Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (Bison Books, 2022).

This book is a beautiful and engaging presentation of drawings and letters by John Douglas Woodward (1846–1924), a prominent American artist/illustrator during the [1870s and 1880s. He was on assignment for New York publisher D. Appleton and Co. to make on-the-spot drawings for illustrations for Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt (1881–1883), which has been called the most important book of illustrations of the region of its time. Some 200 of his compositions appeared in the book as wood engravings, the least expensive mass media of the time, while he contributed the art for 13 steel engravings. Woodward traveled with the somewhat older and better-known artist, Harry Fenn, who was the lead artist for the very successful Picturesque America, published by D. Appleton in parts from 1872–1874. Woodward was the second most prolific contributor to Picturesque America and, like Fenn, also travelled and drew for Picturesque Europe (1878–1879). 

Woodward’s travels for Picturesque Palestine yielded a treasure trove of unique historical art and correspondence. Most drawings for book and magazine illustrations during this period were discarded by the artist after the printing plates were made. But Woodward saved his, providing a visual record, often in full color, of the region, in addition to the black-and-white illustrations in the book. In presenting them alongside his lively, engaging letters, this book will appeal to those interested in the history and art of the Middle East as well as in the appearance of places of importance mentioned in the Holy Bible and the specifics of travel to the region during the 1870s, when there was almost no tourist infrastructure and limited knowledge of other cultures.

Although Picturesque Palestine is well-known to scholars and connoisseurs and available in some libraries and on-line, Woodward’s drawings and letters recording his trip to Palestine are not. The exquisite drawings, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and gouache, belong to the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia and have been stored since 1941 at Shrine Mont, a conference center in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (founded by the artist’s nephew). The letters to his wife and mother belong to Shrine Mont, a retreat and conference center in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley founded by the artist’s nephew, where thy have been stored since 1941. The Letters to his wife and mother are in the collection of the Valentine History Museum in Richmond.

About the Author:
Sue Rainey is an esteemed scholar who has focused her research and writing on artists who prepared book and magazine illustrations in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially John Douglas Woodward and Harry Fenn. Her Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape (Applewood Books (1994 & 2001) was the first study of that landmark 1872-74 publication and won the 1997 Charles C. Eldredge Prize of the National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian) for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art.

In 1997 she and Roger B. Stein curated an exhibit of Woodward’s work at the University of Virginia’s art museum, whose catalog, Shaping the Landscape Image, 1865-1910; John Douglas Woodward (Bayly Art Museum/University of Virginia 1997) won the Award for an Outstanding Publication of the American Historical Print Collectors Society, as did her Creating a World on Paper: Harry Fenn’s Career in Art(Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book) (University of Massachusetts Press 2013). For over thirty years, Rainey has served as volunteer curator of the Woodward collection owned by Shrine Mont, an Episcopal conference center in Orkney Springs, Virginia.

With this haunting new collection of photographs, Joan Myers continues the decades-long journey she began in Where the Buffalo Roamed (with Lucy Lippard), documenting the changing landscape and culture of the American West. The images in this new collection are more personal, more elegiac––and all black-and-white. They bear witness to the slow fracturing of the American Dream, the demise of cowboy culture, and the shrinking of small towns, ranches, and farms throughout western rural America.

The themes she examines are reflected in Devil’s Highway, a powerfully evocative short story by Pulitzer finalist William deBuys, first published in1992 in Story magazine and reproduced again here for the first time. It is as evocative of the social and visual landscapes of the rural West now as when it originally appeared—perhaps more so, touching as it does on the harsh realities of the lives of undocumented workers and other denizens of the border struggling to survive. Myers and deBuys previously collaborated on Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, which inspired the highly acclaimed film, The Colorado.

 Joan Myers has been photographing for more than forty-five years. Her highly acclaimed work has been the subject of three Smithsonian exhibitions, more than fifty solo and eight group shows, and eleven books, including Where the Buffalo Roamed (Damiani 2019), Fire & Ice: Timescapes, with Kathleen Dean Howe (Damiani 2015), and Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (Smithsonian Books 2006). She has spent much of her time roaming the American West, but has also worked in India, the Canary Islands, Antarctica, Java, Sicily, Sardinia, Hawaii, and elsewhere. Her extensive photo archive is now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History on the University of Texas campus.

William deBuys is a Pulitzer Prize non-fiction finalist, a 2008-2009 Guggenheim fellow, and the author of ten books, the most recent of which is The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, (Seven Stories Press 2021). He has collaborated on two previous books with Joan Myers, The Jungle at the Door (George F. Thompson 2012), and Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, (University of New Mexico Press 1999), which inspired the highly acclaimed film, The Colorado, which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015. The recipient of a 2008–2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in northern New Mexico.

TRAVELS ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD provides a sweeping yet intimate view of the breathtaking peaks, splendid valleys, and extraordinary people of this vast region, from the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan, through Afghanistan’s fabled Hindu Kush, the Karakoram in Pakistan, and the Great Himalaya Range that stretches across northern India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan.

Unique in scope among photo books on the Himalaya, TRAVELS ACROSS THE ROOF OF THE WORLD chronicles William and Anne Frej’s more than twenty pilgrimages throughout the area spanning 40 years and 3,000-miles through some of the world’s most remote and difficult-to-reach country. Inspired by the devotion to the practice of Tibetan Buddhism they encountered in the villagers they met on their first trek to Nepal in 1981, they set out on a quest to document Asia’s highest peaks as well as the lives of the resilient people living in these remote mountain fastnesses.

When they began, trekkers from the West through these regions were few. Even now, the trips are demanding––but not nearly as harsh as the daily lives of the residents, who continue to exist in a kind of stunning isolation that has allowed them to maintain the rich cultural traditions and spiritual practices that have sustained them over many centuries. Edwin Bernbaum’s essay rounds out the picture, with its focus on the symbolism, religious importance, and associated legends of these sacred places.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

William Frej has been photographing indigenous people for over forty years, while living in Indonesia, Poland, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan, as well as other remote, mountainous regions of Asia as a career diplomat with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). His first two books, Maya Ruins Revisited: In the Footsteps of Teobert Maler (Peyton Wright Gallery Press 2020), have won more than a dozen awards between them (see their listings elsewhere on this website). His work has been shown at the San Francisco Arts Center, San Francisco International Arts Festival, Galeria La Eskalera in Mérida, Mexico, and Peyton Wright Gallery, Peters Projects/Gerald Peters Contemporary, and Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His images are in the Duke, Notre Dame, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of New Mexico, and Yale. His photographs of Africa, the Himalaya, and India are featured in Sacred Mountains of the World, by Edwin Bernbaum (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Anne Frej is a retired urban planner who focused on feasibility studies and design concepts for commercial real estate projects in the U.S., Indonesia, Central Europe, and Central Asia. At the Urban Land Institute (ULI) in Washington, D.C., she was the project director and primary contributor to four books published by the Institute. She also served as the Asia editor of Urban Land, a monthly magazine published by ULI. At the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, she was as a cultural-resources planner responsible for community-outreach programs and cultural-heritage activities. She was a contributor to Trekking in Nepal, West Tibet and Bhutan, by Hugh Swift (Sierra Club Books 1989).

Edwin Bernbaum, Ph.D., is a mountaineer and scholar of comparative religion and mythology. He is the author of Sacred Mountains of the World, 2^nd edition (Cambridge University Press 2022), the first edition of which won the Commonwealth Club of California’s gold medal for best work of nonfiction, and The Way to Shambala: A Search for the Mythical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas (Shambala 2001), a study of Tibetan myths and legends of hidden valleys and their symbolism. He is featured in “Beyond the Mountaintops: Extraordinary Mountaineers, Extraordinary People,” an exhibit at the American Mountaineering Museum on eight climbers who have pioneered advances in climbing and humankind. Currently he is Co-Chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Group on the Cultural and Spiritual Values of Protected Areas (CVSPA) and Senior Fellow at the Instituto de Montaña, which helps Andean communities become more resilient as they adapt to climate change.

Jane Gray Morrison is an ecologist, author, and filmmaker who currently serves as the executive vice president of the Dancing Star Foundation (dancingstarfoundation.org), a non-profit organization focused on international biodiversity conservation, global environmental education, and animal protection. Her most recent books are On the Nature of Ecological Paradox (Springer, 2021), with Michael Tobias, and Bhutan: Conservation and Environmental Protection in the Himalayas (Springer, 2021) with Michael Tobias and Ugyen Tshewang, former secretary of Bhutan’s National Environment Commission.

Michael Tobias, Ph.D, is a global ecologist, author, and filmmaker who currently is president of the Dancing Star Foundation (dancingstarfoundation.org). The author of some sixty books of non-fiction and fiction, and the writer/director/producer of more than 100 films, Tobias did much of his Ph.D research in Ladakh, India, and has explored mountain ranges on every continent. He received the Courage of Conscience Award in 1996, an honor also bestowed on His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama and Mikhail Gorbachev, among others, and the 2004 Parabola Magazine Focus Award.

Imagine setting out on a road trip in a 1929 Ford Model A Roadster, with the stated goal of traveling from Manhattan to Mexico and Central America, after only a week’s worth of preparation. This is exactly what brothers Arthur Lyon (age 25) and Joe Lyon, Jr. (age 21) did on March 23, 1930. They prepared for the trip by purchasing camping gear, studying maps, gathering information about the areas they planned to traverse, getting their passports and credentials in order, mounted in the car’s rear seat a fifty-five-gallon oil drum equipped with a gas feed for extra fuel, and divided up the princely sum of $324 in cash to fund their sojourn. As for their Spanish? Muy poco (very little).

The story is replete with movie-like accounts of what the young men faced on their epic journey, including encounters with expatriates, government and military officials, and other characters. In Mexico, where they faced nearly impassible roads, they finally had the car fitted with extra railroad wheels so they could literally ride the rails south. The brothers’ 4,562-mile trip ended on May 17, 1930, their fifty-fourth day on the road, after the car suffered mechanical problems and the brothers and car nearly met their fate in the form of an oncoming freight train. Arthur and Joe returned to the U.S. separately, in part by tramp steamer.

The amazing 1930 journey of the young Lyon brothers—the first-ever transnational trip by car in North America—can be seen as the centerpiece of a larger story, of a pair of lives lived out not just as brothers but as partners who sought adventure and careers in the new Automobile Age. To help understand the forces that shaped those lives, the brothers’ nephew, Larry Lyon, provides an introduction that chronicles the family’s rich history, from a family-owned grist mill in southern Missouri to the small mining towns of Pearl, Idaho, and National, Nevada, to their father’s innovative auto-repair business in McDermott, Nevada, the brothers’ founding of Nevada’s first bus company their investment in oil and gas exploration, and many other business ventures.

Denis Wood, the renowned geographer, provides annotations to the brothers’ journey, highlighting geographic, historical, and current events of the time in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. In the conclusion, Sally Denton, prize-winning investigative journalist and author, reminds us of how truly unique was the brothers’ journey and how it represents Americans’ true longing for exploration and adventure. Readers will no doubt appreciate the story as typifying some of the best of our unique American character.

Larry Lyon was born in 1947 in Reno, Nevada, and grew up in Reno and Boulder City, Nevada. He completed his B.A. in psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and M.S. in experimental psychology and Ph.D. in clinical psychology, both at Washington State University. Since 1979, he has worked in the mental health field in a variety of settings, including nineteen years in private practice in The Dalles, Oregon. He currently works for the Veterans Health Administration in Las Vegas. He resides in Boulder City, Nevada.

Denis Wood was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, where he graduated from Western Reserve University with a B.A. in English. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in geography from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he subsequently taught high school. From 1973 until 1996, he taught environmental psychology and design at the College of Design at North Carolina State University, where he was Professor of Design and Landscape Architecture. Author of The Power of Maps (Guilford Press, 1992), he also curated the award-winning Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design exhibition of the same name (subsequently mounted at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.). With Robert J. Beck, he co-authored Home Rules (The Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1994) about the transmission of culture that occurs in the process of “living a room.” The book was designated one of the top 100 geography books of all time by the Royal Geographical Society. His other book publications include Weaponizing Maps: Indigenous Peoples and Counterinsurgency in the Americas, with Joe Bryan (Guilford Press, 2015), Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (Siglio Press, 2010; Second Edition, 2013), Rethinking the Power of Maps (Guildford Press, 2010), The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World, with John Fels (University of Chicago Press, 2008); Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS, with John Krygier (Guilford Press, 2005; Second Edition, 2011; Third Edition, 2016); Five Billion Years of Global Change: A History of the Land (Guilford Press, 2004); and Seeing through Maps: The Power of Images to Shape Our World View, with Ward L. Kaiser and Bob Abramms (ODT, 2001; Second Edition, 2005). Wood also exhibits his artwork and lectures widely.

Sally Denton, born in Elko, Nevada, in 1953, is a third-generation Nevadan. She attended the University of Nevada-Reno before completing her B.A. at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1974. Denton received a Nannan Literary Grant in 2000, Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in General Nonfiction in 2006. In 2008, she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Her career as an investigative reporter resulted in articles in The Washington Post, Penthouse, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and American Heritage. Her books include The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder, co-authored with Robert Samuel (Doubleday, 1990); The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), which was made into a documentary film broadcast on the History Channel; American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomsbury, 2007); The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right (Bloomsbury, 2012); and The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Denton currently resides in Boulder City, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and her Website is www.sallydenton.com.

Sculptor Luis Tapia is a pioneering Chicano artist who for forty-five years has pushed the art of polychrome wood sculpture to new levels of craftsmanship and social and political commentary. Tapia’s insightful, accessible, sometimes controversial, and often humorous pieces reflect contemporary Hispano/Chicano life in New Mexico and beyond. At once an artist and activist, Tapia serves as a powerful spokesperson for his culture. At the same time, his work transcends his cultural surroundings and subject matter, informing and educating large audiences of non-Hispanic viewers about Chicano culture through the elegance of his carving and eloquent social commentary.

Tapia’s works have been acquired by private collectors and museums nationwide, including the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum and American History Museum, El Museo del Barrio and Museum of American Folk Art in New York, Denver Art Museum, and the Autry National Center of the American West in Los Angeles. While his work has been reviewed and included in a variety of publications, this will be the first devoted to an examination of his long career. The essays by leading art historians, curators and literary figures will consider Tapia’s art both inside and outside the local and regional contexts in which it is made, and address its relevance and vitality within the broader national and international artistic conversation.

Luis Tapia regards his work as an extension of the Hispano folk art tradition that was established in New Mexico in the seventeenth century and has continued to evolve over 400 years. His art combines an innovative use of materials with commentary and humor on contemporary social, political and religious issues. Tapia’s work has ranged from updated representations of saints, serious examinations of crime, pedophilia, and the Catholic Church, to parodies of politics and everyday life. His meticulously carved and painted works employ familiar details of popular culture, such as cars, tattoos, golf courses, even one’s weekly laundry, to encourage viewers to examine their own feelings about religion and politics, or simply to laugh and be entertained. Among Tapia’s most popular images are his lowrider cars and life-sized “dashboard altar” installations, both of which explore religious themes within the context of contemporary car culture.

Denise Chávez is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, playwright, actor, and teacher whose work focuses on the border corridor of southern New Mexico, West Texas and Northern México, where she grew up and still lives. Her 1995 novel, Face of an Angel (Grand Central Publishing), won the American Book Award and Premio Aztlán of that year. The King and Queen of Comezón (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) won the 2015 International Latino Book Award in Fiction and the 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Fiction Award. Chávez’s other books include Loving Pedro Infante (Washington Square Press, 2002); a memoir of her mother, A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture (Rio Nuevo, 2006); a short story collection, The Last of the Menu Girls (Vintage Books, 2004); and a children’s play, La Mujer Que Sabía El Idioma de Los Animals/The Woman Who Knew the Language of the Animals (Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

Dana Goia is an internationally acclaimed American writer and poet. Former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts (2003-2009), he is currently the poet laureate of the state of California. He is author of several poetry collections, all published by Graywolf Press, including 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016); Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of the American Book Award; The Gods of Winter (1991); and Daily Horoscope (1986). His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf, 1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism; Barrier of a Common Language: An American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2003); and Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (Graywolf Press, 2004).

Edward Hayes, Jr. is Curator of Exhibitions at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, where he has coordinated more than thirty exhibitions, including the international traveling exhibitions Frida Kahlo, Her Photos (2014) and 20th Century Masterpieces from the FEMSA Collection (2015); as well as Project Room: Marcos Ramírez ERRE; Magical Realism and Modern Oaxaca (2014); Neomexicanism (2014); Marcela Armas: Resistencia y Vórtice; Clarissa Tossin: Streamlined (2015); Korda: Revolutionary Photographer (2015); and MOLAA at Twenty: 1996 – 2016 (2016).

Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, curator and author of twenty-four books on contemporary art and cultural criticism, including most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West (The New Press, 2014); Down Country: The Tano of the Galisteo Basin, 1250-1782, with photographer Edward Ranney (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010); Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (Pantheon, 1990); and The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (The New Press, 1997). Recipient of nine honorary degrees, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Grant, among other awards, she lives off the grid in rural New Mexico, where for twenty years she has edited the monthly community newsletter, El Puente de Galisteo.

Tey Marianna Nunn is Director and Chief Curator of the Art Museum of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Previously, she spent nine years as Curator of Contemporary Hispano and Latino Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of New Mexico, her research focusing on Spanish Colonial, Contemporary Latin American, and Chicana/o and Latina/o art history and history.

In The Persephones, internationally known poet Nathaniel Tarn and photographer Joan Myers have collaborated on an elegant re-telling of the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades into the Underworld. First published in 1974, and again in 2009 in a limited, collector’s edition (both of which are out of print), these poems have attracted a devoted readership. This beautifully designed and produced edition at an affordable price pairs the poems with Myers’s stunning photographs, many of which were shot at the sites from which the myth originated.

Nathaniel Tarn (born 1928) is a British-born poet, essayist, translator, and former publisher whom Kenneth Rexroth has called “One of the most outstanding poets of his generation.” He has published some thirty books in his various disciplines and his work has been translated into ten languages. Joan Myers (born 1944) is the author of Fire and Ice: Timescapes (Damiani 2014). Her highly acclaimed work has been the focus of three Smithsonian exhibitions, more than fifty solo and eighty group shows, and eight books. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Bibliotèque National de Paris, Center for Creative Photography, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

Steve Fitch has photographed examples of “vanishing vernacular architecture,” both ancient (petroglyphs) and modern (neon motel signs, drive-in movie theatre screens, and radio towers throughout the West) for the last forty-five years. Interestingly, as he points out in his essay that accompanies the book, the petroglyphs have endured far better and longer than anything made in the last sixty years. This fascinating and comprehensive volume presents over 100 images along with Fitch’s text, and an insightful essay by curator Toby Jurovics that looks at Fitch’s work in relation to that of the practitioners of the photographic style known as The New Topographics, and Fitch’s own view of it as a kind of cultural anthropology.

Steve Fitch has been a photographer since the early 1970s. He has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Princeton University, and, most recently, at the College of Santa Fe and The Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1973 and 1975, and the last National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant, awarded in 1981. He is also the author of Diesels & Dinosaurs: Photographs From the American Highway (Long Run Press, 1976), and Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains by Merril Gilfillan, Kathleen Howe, and Evelyn Schlatter (University of New Mexico Press 2002). His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.

Toby Jurovics is Chief Curator and Richard and Mary Holland Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Previously, he was Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Associate Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. He has organized exhibitions on Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Barbara Bosworth, Emmet Gowin, A. J. Russell, William Sutton, and William Wylie, among many other artists, and has written seminal essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, and the New Topographics. He is the author of Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan (Yale University Press, 2010).

Watch a clip about Vanishing Vernacular on BBC.

Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea is a collaborative effort by photographer Stephen Strom and award-winning essayist Barbara Hurd. Strom’s images, taken along beaches in the Gulf of California and the Northern California and Oregon coasts, document a world teeming with ancient life-forms, clinging to rocks and finding nourishment but revealed for only a few hours before the tidal waters return. The primitive flora and fauna together create transient marine landscapes whose complex patterns resonate with what we humans perceive as beauty.

Following the rhythms of Strom’s images as they travel between intimate portraits and expansive vistas, Hurd’s lyrical and philosophical essays both continue and complicate those cadences as she explores not just resonance, but also disturbance. As artist and writer move us from high tide to low tide and from the panoramic to the minuscule and back again, the reader is confronted with the larger issues of what happens as the seas rises, warms, and acidifies. Tidal zones are one of the first landscapes to be threatened—almost invisibly—by global climate change. Mussels, barnacles, and tidal pools are flung and ruffled or warmed and acidified in ways that stress the lives of those who live there. Shells begin to thin, species migrate north, and habitats literally disappear, yet few people are even aware of these amazing environments.

Change, of course, is part of an ancient pattern. For billions of years, the sea has risen and fallen, and life-forms have managed to adapt or not. But the current pace of change confronts us with a new and urgent question: Can the long-established but delicately balanced worlds between tidelines evolve rapidly enough to enable continued sustenance and maybe even a new beauty? In Tidal Rhythms, we are given the gift of a new world-view.

Death Valley is the lowest, driest and hottest area in North America. Located about 150 miles west of Las Vegas near the border of California and Nevada, it straddles an area of about 3,000 square miles (7,800 km). A land of extremes and contrasts, it includes a mountain that towers over 11,000 feet, and an oasis that provides habitat for the endangered Devils Hole Pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis). Designated a national park in 1994, its rugged, yet otherworldly beautiful landscape now attracts over 1 million visitors per year.

Attracted by the distinctive topography and light of Death Valley, Stephen Strom began traveling regularly there some thirty-five years ago.  His abstract, almost pointillist compositions reveal the patterns and effects of geologic forces over millennia, taking in both the vast sweep of land and sky and the details of the volcanic cinder cones, sand dunes, dry lakes and salt pans, colorful badlands and canyons, and pine-studded mountains that give the area its distinctive and varied character.

His images are complemented by Alison Hawthorne Deming’s sequence of poems that are as luminous and detailed as the images themselves. Rebecca Senf’s perceptive essay situates his work within the canon of those who have inspired and mentored him, including Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Keith McElroy, Eliot Porter, Frederic Sommer, and Max Yavno.

Stephen Strom is both a research astronomer and fine art photographer. His work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited throughout the United States and is held in several permanent collections including the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, the University of Oklahoma Art Museum, the Mead Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has published six previous books of photography, including three with the University of Arizona Press, Secrets from the Center of the World, with Muscogee poet Joy Harjo (1989), Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland, a collaboration with ecologists Jane and Carl Bock (2005), and Tseyi: Deep in the Rock Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, with Navajo poet Laura Tohe (2005).

Alison Hawthorne Deming is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is the author of eleven books of nonfiction and poetry, the most recent of which are Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit (Milkweed, 2014) and Stairway to Heaven, forthcoming from Penguin in 2016. Her many awards include  the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University (1987-1988), and a 2015 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  She is the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Rebecca A. Senf, PhD is the Norton Family Curator of Photography, a joint appointment at the Center for Creative Photography, and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her recent exhibitions include Debating Modern Photography: the Triumph of Group f/64, Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence, Edward Weston: Mexico, Face to Face: 150 Years of Photographic Portraiture, and Exposing Time: Capturing Change Through Photography. Senf is the author, with Stephen J. Pyne, of Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe (University of California Press, 2011).

Higinio V. Gonzales (1842-1921) was more than a gifted metalworker. A man of varied talents whose poems and songs complement his work in punched tin, Gonzales transcends categorization.  In this book, Maurice M. Dixon, Jr., who has spent more than thirty years studying New Mexico tinwork, describes the artist’s signature techniques. Recounting the scholarly detective work that revealed the full scope of Gonzales’s art and career, Dixon tells the story of this man who was a craftsman as well as a poet.  Featuring translations of Gonzales’s poetry, this award-winning book restores a long forgotten New Mexico innovator to the prominence he deserves.

Maurice Dixon is an artist and art historian based in Santa Fe whose work is included in the collections of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, The National Hispanic Cultural Center, and the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, among others, as well as in numerous private collections.  He has created works on paper and canvas and is also himself a tinsmith specializing in a variety of decorative architectural commissions for public and private entities.  He is co-author, with Lane Coulter, of the highly-regarded New Mexico Tinwork 1840-1940 (University of New Mexico Press).

Carmella Padilla is an award-winning journalist and author who writes about intersections in art, culture and history in New Mexico and beyond. She is of several books that examine New Mexico Hispano art and culture, including, with photographer Jack Parsons, Low ‘n Slow: Low Riding in New Mexico, and The Work of Art: Folk Artists in the 21st Century.

Alejandro Lopez, who translated Gonzales’s poems from Spanish into English is a Spanish-language translator based in Santa Cruz, New Mexico.

Joan Myers’s book, Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey, was published by Smithsonian Books to wide acclaim, and the images were featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 2006. In FIRE AND ICE she adds volcanoes to the mix, with photographs of iconic sites from all over the world, including Volcano National Park on the island of Hawai’i, Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, Cotopaxi and Picincha in Ecuador, Nevada del Ruiz in Colombia, Mt. Erebus in Antarctica, Krakatoa in Indonesia, and of course Mt. Etna and Pompeii. The work is breathtakingly beautiful, compelling, and provocative by turns. Her essay reads like an adventure story, exploring the connection between fire and ice while describing her thrilling treks to ends of the Earth.

from the author’s essay:

“We like to imagine Earth as a ball, a brightly-colored dime-store globe with countries and oceans drawn on its glossy surface. We forget that its surface slides, subducts, and transforms, setting off earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Icy poles melt and then reform over geologic time, dramatically changing sea level. Fire and ice are animating forces for our planet, constantly changing its surface and atmosphere. . . . A stable earth, whatever we would like to think, is an illusion.

I am fascinated by what I cannot see and by what goes on beneath my feet. As a photographer, I struggle to comprehend the magnitude of these forces and changes by photographing volcanic activity and the enormous polar ice sheets. I want to photograph the evidence of geologic time and forces on our landscape. Between the extremes of fire and ice lies transformation . . . and the future of the human race.”

About Joan Myers:

Joan Myers has been taking photographs for more than thirty years, exploring the relationships between people and the land. Her highly acclaimed work has been the focus of three Smithsonian exhibitions, more than fifty solo and eighty group shows, and seven books. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris, Center for Creative Photography, Denver Art Museum, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, High Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, Nevada Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She lives outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. www.joanmyers.com.

About Kathleen Howe:

Kathleen Stewart Howe, PhD has curated over 100 exhibitions and been the author of several catalogues focused on the interplay of photography and culture. Since 2004 she has been the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ‘23 Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art and professor of Art History at Pomona College in Pomona, California. Her exhibitions at PCMA have featured artists John Divola, Edgar Heap of Birds, David Michalek, James Turrell, Frederick Hammersley, Kara Walker, and Enrique Chagoya. Her books include Excursions Along the Nile: The Photographic Discovery of Ancient Egypt (Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1994), which won a Krazna Kraus Foundation Award; and Felix Teynard: Calotypes of Egypt, (Hans P. Kraus, 1992) which was named a New York Times Notable Book in Photography in 1992.

A poignant memorial to the victims of Colombia’s ongoing, armed conflict, the images in MEMENTO MORI: Testament to Life are at once majestic, accessible, and deeply moving.  The book consists of three bodies of work: Drifting Away, images of articles of clothing of “the disappeared,” photographed in water and embedded in glass; Sudarios or shrouds, photographs printed on linen of women who have witnessed atrocities committed against their loved ones; and Relicarios, three-dimensional works of polymer containing mementos and personal effects of the victims.

Accompanied by hauntingly beautiful images of the work at exhibitions and in memorials in areas where the victims were “disappeared,” as well as by essays exploring its social and political implications, this book is a significant resource in contemporary Latin American studies, as well as for social anthropologists, human rights workers, and those wanting to understand at a very basic level the human cost of terrorism.

Erika Diettes is a Colombian visual artist and social anthropologist who explores issues of memory, pain, absence and death in a variety of mediums. Her work has been exhibited in unique spaces linked to re-memoration processes developed by the victims’ movements in Colombia, as well as at other venues including the Museums of Modern Art of Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla in Colombia; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile, at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Fotofest Biennal in Houston, the Festival de la Luz in Buenos Aires, the Ballarat Foto Biennale in Australia, the Malta Festival in Poznań, Poland, and at CENTER in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Museo de Antioquia (Colombia) and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Anne Wilkes Tucker was the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 1976, when she founded the department, until her retirement in June 2015.  While at MFAH she organized or co-organized more than forty exhibitions, including retrospectives on Brassaï, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, George Krause, Ray K. Metzker, Richard Misrach and, most recently “WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY:  Images of Armed Conflict and its Aftermath,” and expanded the museum’s photographic holdings from 141 images to more than 29,000, representing work by some 4,000 artists from all seven continents. In 2001, she was named America’s best curator by TIME magazine.

Ileana Diéguez, PhD is a research professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City, where she works on issues of modern and performing arts, as well as the processes pertaining to performativity and disassembly. She has curated exhibitions on these themes in Mexico and South America, and is the author of several books including Cuerpos sin duelo. Iconografías y teatralidades del dolor/Bodies Without Mourning. Iconographies and Theatricalities of Pain (Document A, 2013), and Escenarios Liminales. Teatralidades, performances y política/Liminal Stages/Scenarios. Theatricalities, Performances and Politics (Atuel 2011).

Ireland is a place of mystical, enduring appeal for many, including the millions of Americans who claim its heritage—over one-sixth the current U.S. population, according to the latest census. IRELAND: One Island, No Borders presents the country as seen through the eyes of one of its most famous and passionate sons, Gerry Adams, the renowned leader of Sinn Fein, and Elizabeth Billups, a Santa Fe-based photographer and activist who fell in love with the country of her ancestors. This unique collaboration reveals the Ireland not always seen in guidebooks, as well as a side of Adams not usually captured in the news.

Adams shares personal anecdotes and family stories along with relevant historical details, legends, and myths, complemented by Billups’ photographs of their favorite places throughout the country, and impressions culled from her many visits. His essay provides a useful overview of Irish history and the long sequence of events that led up to “The Troubles.” His discussion of the historic Good Friday Peace Agreement, of which he was the primary architect, adds an important dimension to the text.

Gerry Adams has written over a dozen books. What makes this one unique is the focus on his deep love for his country, its beauty and its people, as well as on his steadfast political vision. Looking at this gorgeous volume and reading his text will make any reader understand why he has fought so long and so hard for peace and for a united Ireland—and why so many people the world over share his and Billups’s great love of Ireland.

Elizabeth Billups is a Santa Fe-based photographer, philanthropist, and political activist. She is currently on Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s steering committee and Alliance for the Earth’s Guiding Council. She is co-founder of Apsara Global Arts, a company that supports artists and weavers in Cambodia and Laos. Billups also has worked with the American Indian Movement, the International Indian Treaty Council, and Native American poet-activist John Trudell. Her photography has been exhibited in both the U.S. and Ireland.

Gerry Adams has been president of Sinn Fein, the largest all-Ireland party, since 1983. He served as a member of Parliament for West Belfast from 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011. Since then he has been the Teachta Dála or representative to the irish Parliament, the Dail, for Louth since 2011. Heralded as “a gifted writer” by The New York Times, he is the author of a volume of fiction, THE STREET AND OTHER STORIES, as well a several volumes of non-fiction, including A FARTHER SHORE: Ireland’s Long Road to Peace, which was published to wide acclaim by Random House in 2003. He is a native of Belfast.

Though Jessica Todd Harper uses a camera rather than a paintbrush, the viewer quickly senses in her images the familiar canvases of Sargent, Whistler and Vermeer. Harper’s naturalistic images pause or recreate real life for the camera; the play between the often-formal environment and her subjects–intimately portrayed family members–creates images that seem at once intimate and artificial. Her latest collection is thus aptly called The Home Stage, a double entendre that references the home-bound lifestyle of families with small children as well as the idea that home is the stage on which children first learn to live. With her elegant compositions, unique color palette and skillful handling of light, Harper transforms every room and yard into a stage set. No detail is left untouched by her eye: even the wallpaper that recedes into darkness bears symbolic significance. Somehow both private and universal, Harper’s photography is genuine, tender, uninhibited and, at times, humorous, demonstrating the emotional range of the finest actor and director and drawing strong performances from her supporting cast–her husband, her children, her sister, extended family and friends. Harper’s photographs have been reviewed in The New Yorker, Photo District News, Camera Austria, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other publications, and she has taught at the International Center of Photography and Swarthmore College. Her first book, Interior Exposure, was published by Damiani to wide acclaim in 2008. She lives in Philadelphia.

How does a photographer learn to see? How does he create his own visual language—as unique as a fingerprint and as inimitable as the voice of a great writer?

In Iluminaciones, Jack Parsons’s seventeenth book, he takes the viewer on a very personal, deeply intuitive journey that reveals how he has honed his photographic vision. The answer is subtle—and remarkable: It is by growing into his own photographs. Here he shares with us ninety-one of his favorite photographs taken over the long arc of his stellar career. These are images that, over time, taught him, as he says, “to see the everyday world with new and better eyes,” and that encouraged him “to look deeply instead of glancing and forgetting.”

The photographs in Iluminaciones were taken all over the world, from the vast expanses of America’s desert Southwest to a mosque in Turkey and temples in Laos, Burma, and Japan, of colorful streets in Mexico and Italy to quiet swimming pools in Southern California, from monumental urban landscapes in Eastern Europe to clouds forming over Ireland and Maui. Most of the pictures are of simple, commonplace things that we might not give a second glance. Yet Parsons did and in so doing both reveals and celebrates the subtle power and quiet beauty of the everyday. Complemented by the artful commentary of Frederick Turner, Iluminaciones is a stunning visual exploration of the beauty that shines through our world if we take the time to stop and look.

Jack Parsons is well known for his elegant photography that captures the visual heritage of the American Southwest. His sixteenth and most recent book is Dark Beauty (available from George F. Thompson Publishing). In recognition of his contributions, he was honored in 2006 with the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. He lives in Santa Fe.

Frederick Turner is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, the latest of which is Henry Miller and the Making of ‘Tropic of Cancer‘ (Yale, 2012). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, he lives in Santa Fe.

Honoring the Doughboys: Following My Grandfather’s World War I Diary is a stunning presentation of contemporary photographs taken by the author paired with diary entries written by his grandfather, George A. Carlson, who was a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Lowdermilk followed his grandfather’s path through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany, and returned with these meticulously crafted photographs and his own engaging stories that bring the diary to life for contemporary readers.

Lowdermilk’s passion for World War I and military history began as a young boy when he listened to his grandfather tell his stories about serving as a foot soldier—a “doughboy”––in Europe during the Great War. When his grandfather passed away in 1982, Lowdermilk’s mother gave him her father’s diary, which included not only lengthy descriptions of the landscapes, towns, and battles he had experienced, but also keen observations and insights about life as a doughboy for Mr. Carlson and his buddies.

Lowdermilk became fascinated with the diary, first transcribing it, and then plotting his grandfather’s path through France, Belgium and Germany as part of the American Expeditionary Forces. He immersed himself in the history of World War I and its geography, eventually retracing, over a dozen years, the trajectory of his father’s journey.

This image-rich tour of European landscapes, battlefields, and monuments offers the reader an experience that is at once an intimate reliving of Carlson’s time as a doughboy, a lively collection of Lowdermilk’s travel anecdotes, and a moving expression of gratitude to American veterans of the Great War. The foreword by Helen Patton, granddaughter of General George S. Patton, Jr., adds an extra dimension to the narrative.

Jeffrey A. Lowdermilk is a writer, photographer, lecturer, and student of the First and Second World Wars. He has traveled extensively throughout Europe, documenting the path detailed in his grandfather’s World War I diary. He is the author of Saluting America’s World War I Heroes, a historical narrative and photography presentation that documents the eighty-seventh anniversary of the Armistice. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Annie.

Helen Patton is the granddaughter of General George S. Patton, Jr., Chairwoman of the Patton Foundation, and the author of Portraits of Service: Looking into the Faces of Veterans. She lives in Reims, France.